Improvements in manufacturing technology for semiconductor devices in recent years have been remarkable. As semiconductor devices are made with ever higher degree of integration, circuit wiring becomes finer and spacing between wires becomes narrower. Amid such circumstances, semiconductor substrates are required to be made flat. As a means for flattening semiconductor substrates, a polishing apparatus is known that carries out chemical mechanical polishing (CMP). Since polishing apparatuses include many components, they tend to be large in overall size. Therefore, considerable amount of time has been taken to transport substrates to the components suitable for carrying out various steps. Under such circumstances, attempts are being made, on one hand, to produce a polishing apparatus that is compact and can efficiently transport objects to be polished. On the other hand, cleaning of substrates after polishing has been carried out mainly as scrub cleaning using sponges of roll-like or hemispherical shape (See for example the Patent Document 1).
[Patent Document 1]
JP-A 2003-309089 (paragraph 0129, etc.)